Once more: e-Book Royalties

03Jul

“Publishers have been demanding control of ebook rights and the lion’s share of the proceeds since before there were ebooks or proceeds, and now it really is a deal breaker. Their contracts presently are giving their writers between 15% and 25% of the proceeds from ebook sales.

But Amazon and Barnes & Noble are allowing any writer, no matter if previously unpublished or blockbuster best-seller, to sell their own e-books directly on their sites and set their own prices within certain parameters. And these self-publishing writers get up to 70% of the price of every ebook sale – not the 25%, which now seems to have evolved into the so-called “industry standard.”

Compare the numbers for an ebook put on sale directly by the writer at $9.99 and the same ebook put on sale by a publisher at say $12.95. In the first instance, the writer makes $6.80 on each sale, in the second, through a publisher and the “industry standard” only $3.25 …